SingleStat.us, a service I
covered earlier this month that will notify you when your special someone changes their MySpace status, has been shut down by those buzz-killers at News Corp., MySpace's parent company. The site's creator, David Weekly, has posted the cease & desist letter from MySpace's lawyers as well has his response at the SingleStat.us web site. The lawyers allege trademark infringement on Weekly's part as well as putting a burden on MySpace's servers, both of which seem fairly fanciful to me. Weekly's response is worth a read. It begins, "While I do not believe there to be legal grounds for termination of the service, out of respect for the MySpace service the website is no longer operational and there are no more automated queries being made to MySpace's service. (Gross revenues from operations totalled $0.00.)" and ends, "It might seem further unfortunate that with the large number of spam profiles on MySpace that abuse and degrade the MySpace service (with invites to sex webcams and promotions) that News Corp. would see fit to shut down a service engineered explicitly to improve the MySpace experience." Ouch. Valleywag has a
short interview with Weekly regarding the closure. Meanwhile, similar service
DatingAnyone remains operational, as does
Stalkerati.
Tags: David Weekly, DavidWeekly, legal, myspace, newscorp, singlestat.us, singlestatus, stalking
